Question

I have a simple little script that grabs XML and converts it to CSV. However it doesn’t write the headers. Would anyone know how to write the headers?

$file='example.xml';
if (file_exists($file)) {
    $xml = simplexml_load_file($file);
    $f = fopen('newfile.csv', 'w');
    foreach ($xml->Information as $information) {
        fputcsv($f, get_object_vars($information),',','"');
    }
    fclose($f);
}

This would put all the content of the child elements of <Information> in nice columns for Excel. But it won’t write the element names as CSV headings.

Any ideas how I could edit the script to also include the headers?

Thanks

Mike

Answer 1

You can use the SimpleXMLElement::getName() function to get the element name from the first set of data and use that to write the CSV header.

$file='example.xml';
if (file_exists($file)) {
    $xml = simplexml_load_file($file);
    $f = fopen('newfile.csv', 'w');

    // array to hold the field names
    $headers = array(); 
    // loop through the first set of fields to get names
    foreach ($xml->Information->children() as $field) { 
        // put the field name into array
        $headers[] = $field->getName(); 
    }
    // print headers to CSV
    fputcsv($f, $headers, ',', '"');

    foreach ($xml->Information as $information) {
        fputcsv($f, get_object_vars($information), ',', '"');
    }
    fclose($f);
}